Infrastructure

I’ve been involved in database design and development since the early 1990’s (mainly MS Access) on a more or less amateur hacker basis. Since then I’ve progressed through various versions of Access, an excursion into FoxPro (which was great while it lasted) and comfortably landed in PostgreSQL. This has almost entirely been related to research data infrastructure, ranging from the MS Access based Bugs database products (currently BugsCEP) to the current work on the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD). The VISEAD project is expanding the reach of SEAD.

A database is generally only as good as the software created to interface with it, and so the above systems are shrouded in a host of applications. BugsCEP is an ageing VisualBasic 6 frontend to an MS Access 2000 database. SEAD is a more flexible platform, and has interfaces created, by more professional people than me, mainly using Java, JavaScript, PHP and HTML5.